Learn how to master 180-degree immersive video, from camera setup to editing in DaVinci Resolve, with Blackmagic’s free filmmaking guides for 2025.
Apple is preparing another serious push into immersive video, likely the announcement of an Apple Vision Pro 2 at some point in the fall, if Blackmagic’s sudden flurry of activity in the field is anything to go by. Not content with releasing a very immersive-centric DaVinci Resolve Studio 20.1 earlier this month, the company has all just published two heavyweight tomes full of information regarding the format.
The URSA Cine Immersive Camera Guide is a fairly massive 154-page document that dives exceedingly deeply into the way that the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive can be used to produce Apple Immersive Video projects.
While over half of it is developer information and detailed information on the many APIs that can be accessed, there is some interesting stuff in there for anyone thinking about shooting in this sort of format.
This is what it says on camera tilt, for instance.
“When shooting traditional 2D content and placing the camera high or low, the cinematographer will often use camera tilt to maintain composition. Consider how that would affect an Immersive image.
“If you were to angle the camera downwards, for your audience to view the horizon, they would need to angle their head upwards. This would be unlikely to cause motion sickness, but it could break their sense of presence because in real life, the horizon is always directly ahead.
“Therefore, most Immersive shots are captured with a zero degree, or near zero degree tilt. As the camera captures a 180+ degree field of view, both horizontally and vertically, the audience is still able to look up and down. But instead of the filmmaker forcing the audience to look in a particular direction, the audience is in control.
“To encourage the audience to look at different parts of your image, you can use other techniques like lighting, aperture framing, and leading lines.”
Once you’ve worked your way through all that, then there is the 156-page DaVinci Resolve Immersive Workflow Guide. Again a lot of this is taken up with tables relating to APIs, and there is also a lengthy section on the URSA Cine Immersive too (indeed, both guides share a lot of content). But there’s still plenty of space to talk about poorest set up, editing specifics, grading and more.
Again, there’s some specific advice, as well as some specific tools to action it: “When working with immersive content, quick or sudden camera movement can be disorienting to the viewer. To ensure viewer comfort, avoid using takes with quick pans/tilts, rotating motion, or uneven horizons. The Apple Immersive Motion Data feature graphs the x, y, and z acceleration and gyroscope position values to objectively demonstrate where camera motion and movement may be too strong. Editors can use this information to avoid using disorienting sections of footage.”
It’s all interesting stuff that provides a window into immersive filmmaking as it stands in 2025. And if you wanted to break it down into the top bits of advice that we gleaned from a quick scan: